“Art Shanty Projects is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be.”

A frozen lake struck me as a fantastic addition to the catalog of overlooked public niche spaces we’ve talked about before, and one with compelling implications and challenges. Aesthetically, the stark, uninterrupted backdrop evokes a sort of deconstructed museum space, showcasing the whimsical shanties and their performers. Creating art in such an entirely unscripted location is a fascinating prospect – anything could happen.

And, it appears, anything does: the four-weekend exhibition held on the frozen Medicine Lake in Minnesota is self-proclaimed “performance, architecture, science, art, video... More

Since opening in 2007, the San Francisco Federal Building, designed by Thomas Mayne of the Morphosis architectural firm, has been internationally renowned as a model for sustainable architecture and green design. Located on the corner of 7th and Mission Street in the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood, the skeletal grey metal building is visible from blocks away and from ontop of the nearby highway overpass. It stands tall and abstruse, sticking out, literally and visually, from the smaller buildings and offices nearby. On our first official “blogging field-trip, ” Suzanne Stein, Eric Heiman, and myself conducted our own self-guided tour of the federal building to see what exactly all the hype is about.